eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (“XACML”) is a declarative access control policy language implemented in XML describing how to interpret policies for authorization to network resources. According to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the consortium that developed the XACML standard:                XACML enables the use of arbitrary attributes in policies, role-based access control, security labels, time/date-based policies, indexable policies, “deny” policies, and dynamic policies—all without requiring changes to the applications that use XACML. Adoption of XACML across vendor and product platforms provides the opportunity for organizations to perform access and access policy audits directly across such systems.XACML version 2.0 was approved in February 2005, and version 3.0 is currently in preparation.        